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Slack is kind of my litmus test for whether someone understands what's wrong with FOSS. If you do not understand why Slack has grown so much vs. IRC, you don't

by api 10y ago

Slack is kind of my litmus test for whether someone understands what's wrong with FOSS. If you do not understand why Slack has grown so much vs. IRC, you don't get it. User experience is a huge f'ing deal and FOSS doesn't care about user experience. There are two reasons for this. One is that UI/UX work is not fun and so programmers generally must be paid to do it. This is an economic model problem and in some cases a management problem. Jamie Zawinsky observed this over a decade ago and not much has changed: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html The second is that many in FOSS view mastery of arcane systems as a status symbol and have active contempt for any effort to make systems easier to use or more approachable. This is an elitism problem. FOSS is about freedom and equality among developers, but there's also a mentality among many (but not all) that looks down on non-technical people and resents any attempt to bridge that gap. IRC lets people message each other and chat on channels, and Slack lets people message each other and chat on channels. The comparison ends there. Try getting a non-technical person on IRC vs. Slack and now try teaching them to really use IRC -- to transfer files, etc. Now try getting IRC working on a phone. Call me in a few days. Slack is not just warmed-over IRC. All the apparently little things that make Slack so easy to use for so many people took a huge amount of work to implement. UI/UX is hard and painful and requires loads of testing, iteration, and attention to detail. Little things like the fact that when I edit a Slack message it changes everywhere at once reliably are things that took... oh god... I shudder to imagine how much pain. I do believe that open source can overcome this problem, but step one is actually understanding it. So far almost nobody in FOSS gets it, so I'm not optimistic. Edit: one more point about user experience... It's not just about luxury and convenience. It's about cognitive load. Forcing people to learn endless amounts of arcane nonsense to do trivial things that have been done since the 70s is a waste of peoples' time. In the information age information is cheap but attention is incredibly expensive. If something doesn't work instantly it's broken. If I have to spend time figuring it out it's broken. If I have to learn anything more than I absolutely need to learn to make it work it's broken. That's because there are a billion more new things to learn that are waiting in the queue and most of them are probably more important. Next, next, next!

nickpsecurity 10y ago
"The second is that many in FOSS view mastery of arcane systems as a status symbol and have active contempt for any effort to make systems easier to use or more approachable" This x 10. It's the reason Linux was and is so behind on the desktop. It's reason IRC with its cute commands fell behind IM, text, and Slack. It's why Tresys makes money on those who otherwise wouldnt touch SELinux. Probably why many people didnt do backups before specific, usable programs on Windows and Time Machine on Mac. Why they didnt share files so much on FTP but are all over Dropbox and SendThisFile. It's a huge problem they need to tackle immediately. Each thing contributing to bad UX needs to be knocked out of the equation. In many cases, esp configuration files, apathy is usually the reason instead of difficulty.
- api 10y ago
  It's also related to the lack of diversity in tech. Arcane complexity affords an easy way to exclude people from the club in a passive-aggressive indirect way. It's similar to how some religions use complicated systems of ritual, symbol, dietary restriction, etc. to determine who is 'in' and who is 'out'. The thing is there's nothing wrong with this per se. If the goal is to create a place where geeks can show off to other geeks, that's totally cool. But don't get angry or self-righteous when people who are not in an elitist exclusionary club do not use the tools of that club but instead choose 'mainstream' options like Slack, Facebook, etc. After all you are intentionally making it hard for them to use your tools. The complexity and arcana are screaming "go away! this is not for you!" I've personally grown to loathe arcane complexity for its own sake and see it as a sign not of "elite hax0r skillz" but of inferior intelligence and laziness. True genius simplifies, explains, clarifies, and creates things that are elegant because that is harder. Simplicity requires so much more effort and intelligence than complexity.
andrewbinstock 10y ago
Quite agreed. The view that to be an authentic contributor to OSS, I need to use only OSS tools makes no sense to me. It's not even about my time (although that's part of it), it's about using the best tool for the job. If that tool happens to be closed-source, so be it. There's been no "fall of open source." If anything, OSS is increasingly the default for tools. And old, closed source tools are being opened up--for example, Microsoft's massive releases of source for their dev tools.

by api 10y ago

nickpsecurity 10y ago

"The second is that many in FOSS view mastery of arcane systems as a status symbol and have active contempt for any effort to make systems easier to use or more approachable" This x 10. It's the reason Linux was and is so behind on the desktop. It's reason IRC with its cute commands fell behind IM, text, and Slack. It's why Tresys makes money on those who otherwise wouldnt touch SELinux. Probably why many people didnt do backups before specific, usable programs on Windows and Time Machine on Mac. Why they didnt share files so much on FTP but are all over Dropbox and SendThisFile. It's a huge problem they need to tackle immediately. Each thing contributing to bad UX needs to be knocked out of the equation. In many cases, esp configuration files, apathy is usually the reason instead of difficulty.

api 10y ago
It's also related to the lack of diversity in tech. Arcane complexity affords an easy way to exclude people from the club in a passive-aggressive indirect way. It's similar to how some religions use complicated systems of ritual, symbol, dietary restriction, etc. to determine who is 'in' and who is 'out'. The thing is there's nothing wrong with this per se. If the goal is to create a place where geeks can show off to other geeks, that's totally cool. But don't get angry or self-righteous when people who are not in an elitist exclusionary club do not use the tools of that club but instead choose 'mainstream' options like Slack, Facebook, etc. After all you are intentionally making it hard for them to use your tools. The complexity and arcana are screaming "go away! this is not for you!" I've personally grown to loathe arcane complexity for its own sake and see it as a sign not of "elite hax0r skillz" but of inferior intelligence and laziness. True genius simplifies, explains, clarifies, and creates things that are elegant because that is harder. Simplicity requires so much more effort and intelligence than complexity.

andrewbinstock 10y ago

Quite agreed. The view that to be an authentic contributor to OSS, I need to use only OSS tools makes no sense to me. It's not even about my time (although that's part of it), it's about using the best tool for the job. If that tool happens to be closed-source, so be it. There's been no "fall of open source." If anything, OSS is increasingly the default for tools. And old, closed source tools are being opened up--for example, Microsoft's massive releases of source for their dev tools.